Right now your business outlook might seem dark.

There’s a chance you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t affected by this pandemic. If you’re not “an essential business” you could be sitting around watching your bank account shrink because expenses don’t care if you have income or not.

If that’s true for you the following tips just might be your silver lining.

The truth is,

this could be your best opportunity to do something you should have done a long time ago. A chance for you to shift the game plan for your business in order to survive the recession by increasing your online strategies. Because, honestly, we don’t know how long this particular era could last 2 months, 3 months, 6 months or a year and more?

Now, to help entrepreneurs, like you, I’ve put together a 5 step formula on how to succeed in the COVID-19 era.

1. BUILD AN AUDIENCE

Frankly speaking, establishing audiences is of utmost importance.

This is what allows you to customize your messaging and lead people along their customer journey.

Now, in my opinion, the best way to build audiences is through videos. I understand that being on video, for some people, is a scary thought. But, you don’t need to be paranoid about the quality of your videos, you can always improve along the way. By the way, I’m still improving myself.

Keep this in mind.

Consistency is key, you can create a big business style branding effect on a small business budget by putting out consistent content. If you really don’t see yourself doing videos that’s okay because videos are just one of 4 different types of content you can use. Video, written words, audio, and images are the different content types you get to choose from.

Take a look at my social media accounts. You will see that I don’t have an off switch. I write. I take pictures. Do podcasts and videos.

It doesn’t matter how many people are noticing or commenting. I just do content, content, content.

The goal is to be seen and build those audiences.

2. CREATE POWERFUL RESOURCES

Now that you have an audience, it’s your mission to take care of them.

If you believe you have value to give how can you provide that to the world?

Because we have the internet, we can create a variety of resources that effectively last forever. Here are some examples of resources I’ve used:

• Mini-courses
• DIY (Do It Yourself) courses
• Quizzes
• Contests
• Tutorials
• GIve-aways
• Free Webinars

Once you’ve created these resources what do you do with them?

3. USE PAID ADS TO DELIVER THOSE RESOURCES

After establishing audiences and resources you need to connect the two together, right?

By investing in social media ads you can deliver information about your resources directly to the best-matched audiences. This allows you to bring people into your world and gain even more of their trust. The more trust you build the smoother your sales will be later.

By the way, these first 3 steps are crucial for your customer’s journey. 

4. CONTINUE PROVIDING VALUE

How?

Keep on educating your audience, feed their interests, their passions, and their relationship with you. You can do this through your organic social media, paid ads, email, SMS messages, and Messenger communications.

Make sure your messaging is sensitive to the challenging times we are in. Whether you’re giving away information and services or selling products think about how you can position these items to solve problems. 

5. MAKE OFFERS THAT TRULY HELP PEOPLE

The reason so many entrepreneurs fail is because they go straight to this step without building an audience and providing value.

If just making income is the goal of your offer, you cannot truly monetize.

You need to communicate, build audience relationships and nurture them. Once that is done, then you can make offers. In fact, I’d like you to think about something.

How do you make choices to buy?

Do you buy from random ads or from brands that you trust because they have communicated and have given you value?

The value of the offer is in the relationship and how you can serve your audience. 

THE RECAP

These are challenging times and to get through them we need to focus on being visible and providing value that way our audiences see us as reliable resources that they can trust.

So, keep these steps in mind, 

1. Build Audiences
2. Create Powerful Resources
3. Use Paid Ads to Deliver those Resources
4. Continue Providing Value
5. Make Offers that Truly Help People

Now is the time to be creative and help. Be real, in times of crisis highly produced content may send the wrong message.

My hope is that these tips help you stabilize your business and help you position yourself as the go-to authority for your audiences once life starts to get back to normal.

Take care of yourself.

Talk soon.